Jasper Fforde - The Eyre Affair

‘I don’t know, Joff, really I don’t.’

I stared at my tea and refused a Hobnob that he offered me.

‘Mum keeps the memorial well, doesn’t she?’ I said, desperate to change the subject.

‘Oh, it’s not her, Doofus. She couldn’t bear to even walk past the stone—even if she did slim down enough to get through the lichgate.’

‘Who, then?’

‘Why, Landen, of course. Did he not tell you?’

I sat up.

‘No. No, he didn’t.’

‘He might write crap books and be a bit of a dork, but he was a good friend to Anton.’

‘But his testimony damned him for ever—!’

Joffy put his tea down and leaned forward, lowered his voice to a whisper and placed his hand on mine.

‘Sister dearest, I know this is an old cliche but it’s true: The first casualty of war is always truth. Landen was trying to redress that.

Don’t think that he didn’t agonise long and hard over it—it would have been easier to lie and clear Ant’s name. But a small lie always breeds a bigger one. The military can ill afford more than it has already. Landen knew that and so too, I think, did our Anton.’

I looked up at him thoughtfully. I wasn’t sure what I was going to say to Landen but I hoped I would think of something. He had asked me to marry him ten years ago, just before his evidence at the tribunal. I had accused him of attempting to gain my hand by stealth, knowing what my reaction would be following the hearing. I had left for London within the week.

‘I think I’d better call him.’

Joffy smiled.

‘Yes, perhaps you’d better— Doofus.’

Bowden and Victor were out when I arrived at the office; I poured myself some coffee and sat down at my desk. I called Landen’s number but it was engaged; I tried a few minutes later but without any luck. Sergeant Ross called from the front desk and said that he was sending someone up who wanted to see a LiteraTec. I twiddled my thumbs for a bit, and had failed to reach Landen a third time when a small, academic-looking man with an overpowering aura of untidiness shambled into the office. He wore a small bowler hat and a herringbone-pattern shooting jacket pulled hastily over what looked like his pyjama top. His briefcase had papers protruding from where he had caught them in the lid and the laces of both his shoes were tied in reef knots. He stared up at me. It was a two-minute walk from the front desk and he was still fumbling with his visitor’s pass.

‘Allow me,’ I said.

The academic stood impassively as I clipped his pass on and then thanked me absently, looking around as he tried to determine where he was.

‘You’re looking for me and you’re on the right floor,’ I said, glad that I had had plenty of experience of academics in the past.

‘I am?’ he said with great surprise, as though he had long ago accepted that he would always end up in the wrong place.

‘Special Operative Thursday Next,’ I said, holding out a hand for him to shake. He shook it weakly and tried to raise his hat with the hand that was holding the briefcase. He gave up and tipped his head instead.

‘Er—thank you, Miss Next. My name is Dr Runcible Spoon, Professor of English Literature at Swindon University. I expect you’ve heard of me?’

‘I’m sure it was only a matter of time, Dr Spoon. Would you care to sit down?’

Dr Spoon thanked me and followed me across to my desk, pausing every now and then as a rare book caught his eye. I had to stop and wait a number of times before I had him safely ensconced in Bowden’s chair. I fetched him a cup of coffee.

‘So, how can I be of assistance, Dr Spoon?’

‘Perhaps I should show you, Miss Next.’

Spoon rummaged through his case for a minute, taking out some unmarked students’ work and a paisley-patterned sock before finally finding and handing me a heavy blue-bound volume.

‘Martin Chuzzlewit,’ explained Dr Spoon, pushing all the papers back into his case and wondering why they had expanded since he took them out.

‘Chapter nine, page 187. It is marked.’

I turned to where Spoon had left his bus pass and scanned the page.

‘See what I mean?’

‘I’m sorry, Dr Spoon. I haven’t read Chuzzlewit since I was in my teens. You’re going to have to enlighten me.’

Spoon looked at me suspiciously, wondering if I was, perhaps, an impostor.

‘A student pointed it out to me early this morning. I came out as quickly as I could. On the bottom of page 187 there was a short paragraph outlining one of the curious characters who frequent Todger’s, the boarding house. A certain Mr Quaverley by name. He is an amusing character who only converses on subjects that he knows nothing about. If you scan the lines I think you will agree with me that he has vanished.’

I read the page with growing consternation. The name of Quaverley did ring a bell, but of his short paragraph there appeared to be no sign.

‘He doesn’t appear later?’

‘No, Officer. My student and I have been through it several times. There is no doubt about it. Mr Quaverley has inexplicably been excised from the book. It is as if he had never been written.’

‘Could it be a printing error?’ I asked with a growing sense of unease.

‘On the contrary. I have checked seven different copies and they all read exactly the same. Mr Quaverley is no longer with us.’

‘It doesn’t seem possible,’ I murmured.

‘I agree.’

I felt uneasy about the whole thing, and several links between Hades, Jack Schitt and the Chuzzlewit manuscript started to form in unpleasant ways in my mind.

The phone rang. It was Victor. He was at the morgue and requested me to come over straight away; they had discovered a body.

‘What’s this to do with me?’ I asked him.

As Victor spoke I looked over at Dr Spoon, who was staring at a food stain he had discovered on his tie.

‘No, on the contrary,’ I replied slowly, ‘considering what has just happened here I don’t think that sounds odd at all.’

The morgue was an old Victorian building that was badly in need of refurbishment. The interior was musty and smelt of formaldehyde and damp. The employees looked unhealthy and shuffled around the confines of the small building in a funereal manner. The standard joke about Swindon’s morgue was that the corpses were the ones with all the charisma. This rule was especially correct when it came to Mr Rumplunkett, the head pathologist. He was a lugubrious-looking man with heavy jowls and eyebrows like thatch. I found him and Victor in the pathology lab.

Mr Rumplunkett didn’t acknowledge my entrance, but just continued to speak into a microphone hanging from the ceiling, his monotonous voice sounding like a low hum in the tiled room. He had been known to send his transcribers to sleep on quite a few occasions; he even had difficulty staying awake himself when practising speeches to the forensic pathologists’ annual dinner-dance.